Comments

I must say, *onanism* is one of my favorite words. As a wee child I came upon it in some tome which was far beyond my years. It seemed a strange word and inscrutable to my limited vocabulary. I took to looking it up in my elementary school's massive dictionary. The definition answered some questions but raised other, more disturbing ones. It also led to my appreciation of the Bible as a source of naughty and obscure terms and phrases. The eventual religious high school disabused me of any such appreciation.

On another topic, the NK link was truly something. The Communist LCD display was most impressive.

“There are people at the North Pole and the South Pole who cannot come here in multitudes… because the magnetic force is concentrated there, which affects people’s blood and the biological movement of life… In Mecca there is no magnetic force.”

I’m feeling a tremendous urge to show “Islamic science” the respect it clearly deserves.

I think the major point about Mecca time should be the fact that there is no "Islamic Science" any more than there is "Jewish Science", "Christian Science", "Communist Science", etc. There is just Science. As I understand Science, it is the pursuit of accurate description and understanding of natural phenomena. In this discipline, facts (that long-despised notion) and experiments take precedence over opinion, belief, ideology or prejudice. Any attempt to couple science with ideology is bound to yield untruths and if taken too seriously, eventually misery.
Regarding Mecca time itself, it is as good a reference point as any other. If Muslims are so offended by GMT, why not suggest taking some arbitrary meridian in the ocean (that crosses no major nation) as the standard universal time? This should abolish any claims of "colonialist hegemony" over time.

"The [Muslim] watch is said to rotate anti-clockwise and is supposed to help Muslims determine the direction of Mecca from any point on Earth."

Ah, so time will run backwards. How far I wonder. If we went all the way back to the stone age that would doubtless suit all those bone-headed bully-boy clerics that Islam seems to be plagued with.

Mind you, said clerics would probably object to Raquel Welsh in that fur bikini. Still, if they put a bin-liner over her head then they'd have created the perfect world which they yearn for. Grunt grunt.

There’s something compelling about watching people like al-Sayyed, whose worldview is based on credulity, ignorance and bare-faced lies, trying to appropriate physics as reinforcement. Is it cynical, or just deranged?

"I have had MRIs on my back and my knee in the past, and if blood flowed differently depending on magnetic field strength, my body would have exploded like an overstuffed balloon during the procedure. MRIs use a huge magnetic field, tens of thousands of times stronger than the Earth's field. Plus, what does anything he is saying have to do with Greenwich Time?"http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/01/16/mecca-lecca-hi/

Dr Abd al-Baset al-Sayyed’s intellectual credentials are just a tad suspect and he’s not exactly a stranger to raving bonkersdom. He claims that people living in Mecca are less affected by gravity and that the Black Stone of the Ka’ba has supernatural properties and emits “invisible radiation - 100 rays… Each ray can pass through 10,000 people.” According to al-Sayyed, NASA discovered these “rays” too - all “emanating from Mecca” - and has covered it up, no doubt to discredit Islam. However, al-Sayyed is sure this sacred Mecca radiation is “infinite” and extends well past the planet Mars.